From the National Book Award-winning author of The Good Lord Bird. In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
If you think this novel is beginning to sound too nice, too pat, you don't know McBride's writing. He crowds the chaos of the world into his sentences ... McBride's roving narrator is, by turns, astute, withering, giddy, damning and jubilant. He has a fine appreciation for the human comedy ... McBride looks squarely at savage truths about race and prejudice, but he also insists on humor and hope. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels I've read this year. It pulls off the singular magic trick of being simultaneously flattening and uplifting.
Confirms the abiding strength of McBride’s vernacular narrative. With his eccentric, larger-than-life characters and outrageous scenes of spliced tragedy and comedy, “Dickensian” is not too grand a description for his novels, but the term is ultimately too condescending and too Anglican. The melodrama that McBride spins is wholly his own ... If there’s a ramshackle quality to McBride’s plotting, it’s the artful precariousness of a genius. His expansive collection of ominous, preposterous and saintly characters twirls like loose sticks in a river, guided by a physics of chaos beyond all calculation except awe ... We all need — we all deserve — this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.
Moves with the precision, magnitude and necessary messiness of some of Gego’s most inspired structures ... The book is a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel ... McBride takes his time unfurling the story from there, introducing more and more Chicken Hill residents in the novel’s first third, which might leave some readers feeling as though the plot stalls before it even starts ... His style here won’t please readers who want the author to cut to the chase, and I’ll admit that early on I felt annoyed when yet another new character would take center stage instead of the novel getting on with this business of who did what, how come and what’s going to happen to Dodo? But McBride’s story is not to be rushed ... A charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages.
